Remember the Venice Project? Back in 2006 people were sure this mysterious IPTV solution would ‘kill YouTube’ and even Om Malik wanted an invitation. So, what happened to it? It was released as Joost – a service which offers quite high definition video but still lacks major shows (their offering primarily being a few series of Babylon 5 and Peep Show in the UK) and more often than not has content already available on other sites. They even abandoned their desktop P2P-based approach to taking a more accessible streaming Flash browser video one. Joost definitely is not one of the greatest Web 2.0 services like many expected it to be!
Perhaps you recall ‘Citizendium‘, a wiki encyclopedia which unlike Wikipedia had strict editing controls. The site was co-founded by Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger. Despite coverage from major news outlets (from newspapers to tech blogs), Citizendium has failed to ever seem to reach a reasonable size: only 9217 articles in over 2 years. That’s roughly the size of Wikipedia… in Chuvash (a language spoken in a small Russian republic!).
What about coComment? The service in many respects seems to have been usurped by Disqus etc. yet coComment’s aim of unifying fragmented conversation has still gone unachieved. coComment used to be extremely popular, but now I do not know any blogs, nor bloggers, who use it.
Another example is AllPeers. AllPeers was basically a service which allows people to set up ‘private’ P2P networks so friends etc can share files. This was all done through a Firefox plugin. Demand for invites was high, but it has now shut down despite its old popularity!
Web 2.0 was the era of “hype”. This often led to disillusionment and disappointment, but we should not forget the success stories… I know people through this blog who have made a small fortune.
I use about 3 or 4 forums, but to check my activity I have to go on each individually. Someone can’t browse my posts at one forum on another. I can’t browse someone’s posts on one forum on another. There isn’t a shared log-in. It’s a bit silly.
The fact every forum is so contained in itself definitely creates community, but from a social point of view linking them together more would surely be beneficial.
Linking them together would have several advantages: users could find other forums, friendships could be maintained across forums and it’d be much better than having to Google someone and then guess if it’s the same person.
It’s amazing sites like Disqus haven’t existed for years for forums!
A brief post, I know, but I’m sure there’ll be lots of opinions. Why hasn’t Web 2.0 hit forums yet?
For many years, I – like many others – despised the audio and visual aspects of the BBC website which relied primarily on the dreaded Real format. This required me to install a media player which was effectively a glorified piece of adware and more frequently than not, my web browser would crash when I actually tried to play it!
When the BBC released iPlayer, I was pleasantly surprised to see Flash (a relatively universal format) being used (in addition to WMV, unfortunately, for downloads). Whilst some may advocate the use of a format such as Ogg over this, I believe Flash was a better choice as for the average internet user, it was more accessible and the web browser plug-ins are more stable.
BBC’s choice of utilising Adobe AIR for their Linux and Mac iPlayer applications was also very interesting. Once again, I felt wary of the BBC relying on a propietary runtime environment as opposed to simply compiling their own applications as standard binaries for the operating systems. Practicability was probably the issue as AIR allowed FLV etc to be integrated with ease and smoothly and the BBC also realised that AIR is quite cross-platform (since the release of a version for Linux) and now quite accepted. Whilst an open-source solution in many ways would be ideal, it is impossible as the BBC demand to use DRM, something which could no doubt be hacked with ease if the sourcecode were public.
The BBC News website has been very good for a long time. Unlike many news websites, redesigns and the style of URL has not rendered many articles dead. I think the BBC are clever in keeping stories from a period in that period’s design; it ensures compatibility, gives a reflection of the era and prevents confusion (for example, based on the design alone, anyone can tell this article is no longer accurate). Their news website is also remarkably usable when compared to those of their competitors; it has clearly defined but small and accurate categories (‘Africa’ has its own category, as opposed to just being ‘World News’), there’s a clear navigation system and there isn’t an excessive amount of pictures or videos.
Many people behind-the-scenes at the BBC now maintain high quality blogs which add depth to reporting. Whilst the ever-so-neutral Daily Mail criticises these ‘Leftist’ blogs , lots of it is just commentary, explanations for views which may have been inferred and information about working at the BBC. The effect is that the organisation becomes more human as opposed to a vast inhuman public broadcaster. They are attempting to reach as much of their audience as they can, maintaining a Welsh language blog!
The BBC seems to have realised what their audience wants and instead of having an inaccessible website, they’ve embraced Web 2.0 and made the media seem more human and their webpages significantly more user-friendly.
